“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” - C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In
Laura and Fernando are going to chat about Herman Mellville’s Moby Dick, read through anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and mathematical practices.
C. L. R. James read Moby Dick through its queer, indigenous, working class, motley crew, as it charts an anti-capitalist map of the “living madness” of industrial civilization, on fire and plunging blindly into darkness.
In helping us understand the fundamental and abysmal swing between the given and Utopia in modern life, does a mathematical reading of Moby Dick offer us a profound abstract orientation with which to understand our times? As we follow the book, as we sink in the bottom of the abyss to then be able to ascend, or rise to high cusps to be able to later descend, we mirror the transits of contemporary maths, moving between the local and the global, the real and the ideal, crossing through the penumbral zones, the half-darkness and outposts of the obscure where our lives are lived.
